Actually providing the SEO service to clients...

SEO is one of those mysterious things that I've given up on trying to do myself. I like to learn about the strategies so I have an idea of whats going on and it's harder for vendors to snow me, but I am also wrestling with the decision to offer it.

If I were to offer it I would want to have a VERY thorough contract because it's difficult to manage expectations and you can count on calls the moment ranking drops even the smallest amount.

There are enough resources on this forum to outsource virtually every aspect of online and offline marketing. You could leave SEO out of your portfolio and still offer a vast array of products and services. The best part is, you only have to know how to use email to be successful.

If you can do it yourself you usually don't outsource.

I suggest really knowing how SEO works and the different types of ways people build links because if you hire someone that is going to do blackhat is going to cost less then someone that is going to do white hat.

One of my mentors always told me to know enough to question someone's ability to effectively get the job done. He never specialized, but would keep you on your toes with questions like he'd been studying for years. He was a very wealthy man.

Another one of my mentors told me, "I know I'm not that smart, I'm just smart enough to hire the best people (in my industry) to have an unbeatable team".

The best asset you can learn is sales. The ability to have consumers/businesses believe in your product/service enough to give you money for it is your best asset, no matter what business you get into.

SEO LinkVine by itself is probably not the best option. There are better networks out there, but you need to have a more diversified strategy for backlinks than just one network. What happens if that network goes under? Bye-bye rankings.

I do my own SEO for clients and I have some people that outsource their SEO to me. I can tell you the cost varies greatly. I do not give out flat rates and quote on a per project basis. You can find others who have a set number of packages you can choose from. I never liked that approach. I think SEO for each client is different. There are some underlying principles and techniques that are the same, but what works in one line of business is not guaranteed to work in another line of business.

If a project is not going to take much work, I can charge a much lower price than if I just had a couple of packages I offered. On the other hand, I don't want to screw myself and take on a project that will take an incredible amount of time and investment at a price that is going to hurt me.

The prices for outsourcing your SEO is going to vary, greatly. I have seen a few people pop up recently offering page one rankings for $99/month. I've contacted a few of them to see what they are offering (I always watch what the competition is doing), and I was shocked at how little they knew about what they were doing and the methods they are using. If I did to my clients what they are doing to theirs, and really showed and explained it to them, I would be fired by each of them.

You'll find other SEO's for outsourcing the work that charge up into thousands of dollars depending on the scope of the work.

If you are going to outsource the SEO work, make sure you have a conversation with the person and fully understand what they will be doing. If they aren't willing to explain it to you in detail, well that is a good time to walk away. You don't have to understand it all, but if they start talking about secret strategies and such, that probably means they don't really know all that much about what they are doing and are just throwing sites into SEnuke X or some other software. Great way to get your client's site deindexed.

You can find some really cheap outsourcers from India, the Philippines, and other places, but I worry about that. If it is my site, hey whatever. If something gets screwed up and I lose the site, I'll deal with it. When it is the website of a client, that is a completely different story and you need to be much more cautious with how it is treated. I think you are much better off using these outsource workers for specific tasks that you designate (like social bookmarking or writing a few articles) versus turning over your full SEO plan to them.

If you only have a basic understanding of SEO and are not fully comfortable with it, I would recommend pulling in someone to outsource it to. Although there are WSO's that will tell you otherwise, SEO takes a long time to learn. Along with that, you don't want to be learning on your client's sites.